The power of StumbleUpon

In comparison to most bloggers, I’m relatively new to the scene, having only had my blog online for the last 6 months. And one thing I’ve learnt is that driving traffic to your blog, if you’re not some celebrity or, world-renowned uber geek, is very difficult. I try to post things I find interesting but not only to me, but which I think others will find interesting too.

So yesterday a friend sent me a copy of the alleged, leaked, “Vista Source Code” which I thoroughly enjoyed and promptly posted. It received a few hits during the day, but at some point between yesterday and this morning, someone linked to my post on StumbleUpon.

The day’s not over yet, and the post alone, has generated over 1600 hits today. So, what, ask the bloggers who get thousands of hits on their blogs daily. Well, to me, it’s quite an achievement and to put it in perspective, my blog averages about 1500 hits a month!

and someone bookmarked it on ycombinator. for the next three days i had an average of 500 uniques a day .I was euphoric but now i am back to less than 50 uniques a day. the impact has the same effect like a drug high and I am now desperately seeking for my next fix.

The same thing happened to one of my early posts. It got Stumbled Upon and in a single month I exceeded my ISP limit of 4gb per month and had to switch to theor server in Germany which has a 40gb limit!! It also skewed my stats horribly. I now almost always have an impossible ‘monthly goal’ set for Statpress because I can’t live up to that one month.

@Tim – Thankfully my blog is still hosted with WordPress and they didn’t come complaining to me about the traffic (yet). And yes, my stats are going to be forever messed up and my daily stats graph looks like a single heartbeat amongst a flat line.